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gaijinsr writes "The damage done in what CERN calls the 'S34 Incident' (and what other people call a major explosion in the cryogenics system) is much more serious than originally admitted: The earliest possible restart date is late summer next year, but with some proposed improvements to avoid repetitions of the incident, it looks more like 2010. They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN."

"but with some proposed improvements to avoid repetitions of the incident, it looks more like 2010." RTFS. I personally shall beat up two physicists on that holiday (starting with my physics teacher if you could call him one).

So until the LHC becomes active, if there is the chance it will destroy the earth, no matter how slight, does that mean until its active the world is both destroyed and not destroyed? (AKA the cat in the box)

Funny you mention pot. I had a dream about chicks looking to me to get high. This must have been a transmission from a different universe. LHC need to help us find this universe for the sanity of the human race (well that's what will be in the business case).

the Mayan calendar merely resets at that date. similar to how computers were expected to reset at y2k, it was not that they expected the world to end they just did not include dates after that much like our calendar does not include specifically year numbers for after 9999(unless you count adding a digit but in that case you would expect the current year to be specified as 02008). http://www.xkcd.com/509/ is somewhat relevant.

But if not for that date, then when else would we set our upcoming Impending Doom day? We need those for, you know, having the feeling of being at the ends of times and therefore on a sort of historical cutting edge, rather than in the middle of a long era during which our precise time isn't much more important than any other time in history.

the Mayan calendar merely resets at that date. similar to how computers were expected to reset at y2k

Indeed, I've heard that there's a big boom going on in Central America for stonemasons. All sorts of contractors are already down there, urgently carving updates into the hieroglyphs on all the pyramids and temples before the rollover date.

the Mayan calendar merely resets at that date. similar to how computers were expected to reset at y2k, it was not that they expected the world to end they just did not include dates after that much like our calendar does not include specifically year numbers for after 9999

Actually it's even less catastrophic than that. The Mayan long count calendar [wikipedia.org] is based on a hierarchical system of cycles, called kin (1 day), winal (20 days), tun (18 winal), katun (20 tun) and baktun (20 katun). Dates are indicated by giving the position in the relative cycle, so today, November 27, 2008, would usually be quoted as 12.19.15.15.15 in the Long Count calendar. You can check out the conversion formula e.g. in the source code for Fourmilab's calendar converter [fourmilab.ch].

It's one of the common apocalypse dates. It started with the Mayan calendar, but it also applies to some chinese fortune telling book, and one of the major Nostradamus types also predicted it as well. What's funny is there is a web crawler bot program used to predict stock market trends that also predicts this date, and supposedly this system predicted 9-11 90 days before it happened.

They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN.

Ummmm, perhaps scientists don't like to make statements that they aren't reasonably sure of? If there were still some disagreement or doubt about this timetable, I would fully expect them to keep it internal, and would be disappointed if they made a public statement prematurely. It's not like this timetable is exactly time critical today or anything...

This is a work funded by taxpaid dollars, so it should be kept open and transparent. The author of the article is right in this premise.

But I disagree strongly with her perception of the situation. CERN's earlier statements have only been that they did not know how long repairs would take, but that the earliest LHC could possibly restart would be late spring 2009. This is the first time to my knowledge that they have given an estimate of when they actually expect the accelerator to be ready. There was nothing hidden or hushed up about this.

While I'm all for transparency in spending of my tax money, sooner or later you have to stop micromanaging and let people do their job. Otherwise, you will get less for your money.

I'm paid tax money in my current occupation (CS student). I'm hoping there's enough oversight that you can trust that I'll be thrown out on my ass if I'm not worth the money I'm paid, without me having to be held accountable to other people than my

If we all are happily nit-picking, I think you should have a look at the Cern member states [wikipedia.org]. While you are right, major parts of Cern are located in Switzerland, the majority of taxpaid $currency used for its funding is definitely Euro, not Franc (and saying that "some of the LHC's funding does come from the Eurozone countries" is a ridiculous understatement...)

Well yes, I know this. I am a particle physicist working on CDF after all. Although I'd disagree with your claim of international rivalry/jealousy. I just don't see it in the field. Maybe among the politicians or something, but not really among the scientists. (and it should be year and a half, tops, since 2008 is almost over already) But what on Earth did this post have to do with my post? What exactly are you replying to?

The submitters original comment was about how this doesn't seem like CERNs typical "information policy". You put this down as your subject line and then stated that this release of information may have been delayed "perhaps scientists don't like to make statements that they aren't reasonably sure of?" -- My reply was merely to point out an alternative possible explanation, namely that the delay in the release of information may have been motivated by politics. The scientists working on the project likely do

The United States made an attempt at building something similar to the LHC several years ago but funding was cut. It was viewed at the time as a major setback in science and would lead to a brain drain in the United States as scientists went overseas where they could be with better equipment. Funding for the LHC was nearly cut several times amid cries that funding should be focused on "more important" science such as global warming. Part of the reason it got built was precisely because it could show that th

CERN is an international organisation (like Interpol, WHO, UN, etc.), located on the border between France and Switzerland (Switzerland is NOT part of the EU either).Buildings are mostly in Switzerland, while most of the tunnel is in France.

CERN predates LHC of something like 30 years.The LHC is built in the tunnel used previously (for 10 to 15 years) by the former main CERN project (LEP: Large Electron Positron Collider).

While the LHC is indeed not an EU project, most of girlintraining's remain valid. Politics and national pride play an important part in the internal workings of CERN, and could well explain the communication policy.

Calling people full of nonsense because they did not get some details right is not very polite, dear Anonymous Coward. Actually, there are quite a few building in Prévessin. And while CERN is definitely not an EU project, it is different from the WHO, or the UN in the sense that it has a geographic definition, it is called the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Some of the funding for CERN related projects, like the grids efforts, comes directly from the EU.

Funding for the LHC was nearly cut several times amid cries that funding should be focused on "more important" science such as global warming.

Both will destroy the known universe of course, but the LHC option will be less worse - sort of like ripping off the band-aid quickly. Some want to prolong and spread the pain, thus the promotion of the slow death option.

Arguably, the reason the EU was brought into existence was to compete with the US. There's a lot of pride tied into making this thing work.

The whole world doesn't resolve around the USA you know...The first coal & steel treaty was aimed at creating friendship amongst western European countries. The goal of the founding father was basically trade is the best tool to prevent any further misunderstanding leading to a bloody war. There were no form of pride...Just the fear of a third collective suicide on the European continent.

Switzerland isn't part of the EU.

Most Scientists don't give a damn about nationalist pride...What matters to them is

Many of the discussions of the future at CERN and the LHC era end with the question - "Yes, but how will we ever keep track of such a large project?" This proposal provides an answer to such questions. Firstly, it discusses the problem of information access at CERN. Then, it introduces the idea of linked information systems, and compares them with less flexible ways of finding information.

It then summarises my short experience with non-linear text systems known as hypertext, describes what CERN needs from such a system, and what industry may provide. Finally, it suggests steps we should take to involve ourselves with hypertext now, so that individually and collectively we may understand what we are creating.

This being said, I'd say that the LHC has already paid for itself a thousand times over.

The WWW was just hypertext on the internet, and not really a new idea at the time. Ted Nelson invented the "hypertext" concept in 1963, and hypertext became commercially available in 1987. Just how long *has* the LHC been in development?

I once worked at on the LHC at CERN and still have some contacts there and in a couple of conversations have come across some rather interesting bits of information.
The fault has been isolated to a single connector, however the analysis was rather difficult as a large amount of the suspect conductor was vaporized by the current surge.
The wires are supposed to carry 8,700-Amps!!! at full power, the intrinsic resistance in this particular bad joint caused some localized heating which then caused a portion of the conductor to no longer be superconducting. all of the current then passed through a sudden, unexpected load and voile, lots of heat, boiling helium and a chain reaction of nastiness. Looks like the pressure discs ruptured as expected, but they were overwhelmed by the sheer amount of boiling Helium, 6-Tons!, and the vacuum vessel buckled and ruptured causing other magnets to quench. the sheer force of the expansions knocked more than 20 of these steering magnets off of their supports. Slightly more problematic then first reports indeed.
There was always an expectation of shutting down the beam for the Winter as the cost of electricity for the experiment is a major operational consideration and rises prohibitively for the experiment during peak heating season.
Hope that they can fix their problems and catch any other flaws before they attempt to ramp up again. Here's to the exploration of fundamental principles.

Sure. But if you had one of these in space, that would not be an issue. The beam is charged, and that will make it spread out - by my calculations, to maybe a meter wide in 1000 km, which would limit the range.

I think that the beam dump targets [web.cern.ch] are impressive. Down 600 meter tunnels there are 7 meter long graphite dumps, with 750 tons of shielding, just to safely absorb the beam energy when they want to shut the thing off.

The repairs will actually be done a little sooner, but they pushed back the release date so they wouldn't have to fight with Star Trek [startrekmovie.com], Transformers [imdb.com], or Harry friggin Potter [imdb.com]. Just be lucky Iron Man [imdb.com] is waiting until 2010 or we'd never get any sciencing or universe imploding done.

The initial cause of the incident was probably a bad weld in a busbar joint. But they'll never know; the entire busbar was vaporized when it lost superconductivity under load.

The quench protection system wasn't designed to properly handle a failure of the superconducting busbar between two magnets. There's an elaborate system to dump the energy from a magnet that's starting to lose superconductivity into a big resistor bank. They expected occasional problems within the magnet windings, but this failure wasn't in a winding. The quench system is being redesigned.

The cryogenic system needs many more pressure relief valves. In this event, 6 tons of liquid helium was vaporized, which is 30,000 cubic meters at 1 atmosphere. That much helium couldn't get out of the existing relief valves fast enough, sizable parts of the plumbing were damaged, and magnets were pushed off their mounts. Now that was just bad pressure-vessel design. They should have had enough relief valves or rupture discs for the worst-case scenario. That would have localized the problem. Given the huge amount of energy in the magnets, in close proximity to liquid helium, in an experimental machine, this could not be a totally unexpected possibility.

More relief valves are going in, which means the whole ring has to be brought up to room temperature and atmospheric pressure for plumbing work.
Then the whole commissioning process has to be repeated, which takes months.

The tunnels are empty of people when power is on, because if all that helium vents, the air is unbreathable. But this event was big enough that it could have affected people in experiment halls at tunnel level. If this had happened during actual use, people could have been killed.

A magnet quench isn't supposed to be a big deal. Early design specs said that restarting after a magnet quench should only take a few hours. Oops.

1) CERN's communication has been lacking. Especially in deleting reports immediately after the incident on their eLog that had been open. That was a black eye on their image.

2) Plans change as more information comes in, so no one should be surprised by initial statements saying "The earliest possible date is several months" (which would be the case if no magnets needed replacing) followed by Spring '09 if everything goes well. This is now followed by Summer '09 to just repair the problems and late '09/ early '10 if remedial actions are taken.

3) CERN is changing directors in a month or so. The new director will make the decision of cautious startup vs. remediation and more aggressive startup. My expectation is the latter.

The world can wait an extra year for these results. I feel bad for the students and post-docs who are waiting for the data to emerge, though.

I work on the LHC experiments as well, so I'm posting anonymously, too.

1) The failure of the flux capacitor was actually the real cause of the shutdown (although this will never be released due to the humiliation that would be heaped upon them for such a simple mistake - see below).

2) Apparently no one told them that when you accelerated it beyond 88 mph (within the limit of their test runs) it would create a hole in time/space through which a moderately-priced novelty sports car (or something of equi

I am one of those students waiting for data actually. I was even at the talk in question. One thing though is that the 2010 plan is just a proposed plan, nothing in stone. Apparently it has less support than the plan starting this summer, but they are still debating which is the best way to go.

There was another announcement recently as well pointing towards the summer 2009 plan, so it is probably more likely. We'll know more in Feb once they've had more chance to study the data from the incident.

I'm waiting for it to be delayed until 2012 and for people to flip out in a way not seen since "The Great Disappointment." We have a few years for people to build their bunkers before CERN starts back up. In all seriousness though, I can't wait for it to be turned back on, every day it's delayed is just delaying possible breakthroughs in science.

LHC is obviously a doomsday machine. Turning it on will immediately destroy humankind in all the parallel universes where it works. Therefore, in the universes where we stay alive, we will always see it fail. The failure proves the parallel structure of the universe.

If you'd RTFA you'd have known that that was the precision given in the internal CERN presentation. That mentions "summer" because the machine shuts down during winter anyway to leave the Swiss with enough electricity. Hence the important question is for which operating seaon the repairs can be done.

To repair the problem and get operational as soon as possible was the answer to the first time given. The longer time frame is to modify the design to prevent this failure from happening again. If they went the first option, if this ever happened again, it would again be months to repair it (and the failure could kill people). The longer time frame will change a design consideration so that if this happens again, they could possibly be back operational within hours at no risk to people.

They kept this pretty quiet up to now, not the kind of information policy I would expect from CERN

I think the explanation is straightforward: this is a very complex system, not only to build and run, but also to figure out why things went wrong. The modern day public are used to a media circus, where we follow events as closely as possible - but heavily edited for whatever pseudo-drama can be wrung out of it, to make it look like a soap-opera or a "reality" tv show. One can't blame them for not buying into that - they just want to figure out what went wrong, repair things and get on with research; they

Would *you* really let someone dumb enough to brag about the black hole machine suddenly exploding catastrophically the first time it was turned on to the uneducated (and easily panicked) masses back at the controls for another try?

What are you blabbering about? The failure of the LHC proves absolutely nothing about the validity of the many-worlds interpretation, and you're trying to apply the anthropic principle (misinterpreted) to an unsuitable situation.